


apastron

by Mythopoeia



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [174]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: All the usual Angband tags, Angband Found Family, Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pining, Slavery, Sort Of, Starvation, Tag to Ch18 of WTIC, Why did we make that a thing, Yes Belle is AU Arien in case u missed that earlier, happy new year, meanwhile: belle edition, these tags are a mess, you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:40:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22082773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mythopoeia/pseuds/Mythopoeia
Summary: Do not pity me, Russandol says, with the white look in his eyes, with the blood between his teeth, with the bruises he left on Gwindor’s hands after he did not cry out. With the mask at his mouth and the whip at his back. For God’s sake, don’t—pity—me—(Belle, left to die, lives.)
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [174]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 8
Kudos: 25





	apastron

Belle holds out her hands, and does not struggle, and as she watches Gothmog wind the cord around her wrists she clings to her calm by reminding herself that she has always known she would die like this. Or—no. Not always, not when she was young, in the time before she knew Bauglir’s name. But in all the time since, ever since Mairon’s knife. She has been a dead woman living on a ghost’s time, these last years, and she has known, truly, every day she has wakened knowing that today could be the day it would end—like—

“Christ, you’re a cold one,” Gothmog observes as he would the weather, indifferent as he yanks the cord tight enough to cut. “I’d expected you to wail. Or can you even cry, with your face that way?”

Her fingers are already going numb. This pain will be the least of her pains, before death, but still it is pain.

He knots the cord, and shoves her towards the storeroom. It is a dry goods pantry, and she gets a scarce glimpse of it when he pulls the door open and light spills in: stacks of cloth bags, of crates, and dry dust scuffed with boot prints on the floorboards. He shoves her through the doorway hard enough that she falls, awkwardly, against one of the sacks. When he slams the door shut after her, the darkness is absolute.

Belle hears the key fumble then click in the heavy lock, hears the heavy bootfalls as Gothmog returns to his table. Hears the careless fall of liquid, as he pours a fresh cup of what must be, by its smell, coffee.

Belle’s throat is dry. Her eye, too, is dry. Gothmog mocked her, but the truth is that she can cry—that she _has_ cried, of course she has. 

(Belle has wept more, since her maiming, than she ever did in all the years before. For herself, at first, and for Haldar, more recently, and for little Amlach’s mother, who was her friend.

(For the sound of a broken man’s voice saying, to her nightmares: _No._ )

She should not have thought of Russandol. In the dark, tears fight to rise. Belle refuses to let them fall.

*

Belle drank that morning, enough and more than enough, for such is her habit before days spent in the fields, where she might not be given water again until nightfall. She ate, but only a little, as another habit she has developed has been saving some of her food for Russandol. She and Gwindor learned early that he does not eat unless watched, and then only reluctantly; supplying him some of her own breakfast and supper ensures he feels obligated to choke it down. He always thanks her, in his raspy, quiet voice. Only once did he try to refuse, and she had shown him stubbornness of her own, then. 

(“I shan’t starve,” he had protested, blinking down at her. That had been the first day he was strong enough to sit up in the cot unaided, and she felt small sitting next to him, though she was determined not to show it. 

“Neither shall I,” she had fired back. He had frowned, worrying his lower lip between his teeth in a tell she had learned, by then, meant that he was thinking. But he had eaten the potatoes.)

Belle pushes herself painfully up to sit against the sack she fell against, the shape of it unyielding against her back. The weather has grown colder these last few weeks, as late autumn fades into a dingy, bitter winter. The cold, maybe, will also prolong her life, for she shall not sweat. 

She tries to calm the clamor of her heart, and closes her eye, and tries not to wait for the hunger pangs to start, for the thirst to begin. Thus, she sleeps. 

*

She wakes after she knows not how long, and she cannot feel her hands. When she tries to move them, disoriented, pain rips through her wrists, and she freezes as she—remembers. Gothmog’s summons. The rope. The door. The dark. 

She remembers that she is, to all intents and purposes, dead.

How long did she sleep?

There is no sound from the other side of the door, but there is still a ribbon of unbroken light beneath it, skating dimly across the floorboards. Belle stares at it, blinking. That pale smear is likely the last she will ever see of the sun, is the thought that rises unbidden, and she must blink harder, biting her tongue. Perhaps Sarah, or Maria, or some other of the women have noticed by now that she has not returned; has sent word, maybe, to Gwindor, a foreboding whisper. Maybe Gwindor thinks her dead already, maybe Russandol mourns her. Would Russandol mourn her? She thinks so. He is not a hard man, is Russandol, despite everything. There is too much kindness in him to know death with indifference. Gwindor _is_ a hard man, but even he wept over poor Haldar. 

She is—flattering herself. Her death, so long delayed, is in the end merely another form of being discarded, thrown away as though they cut the heart from her body, that day they cut her beauty from her face, and have finally thought to rid themselves of the corpse left behind. They do not even care to see her suffering; not like how they insisted on torturing Russandol out in the open, in the sunlight, where everyone could gawk. Poor comfort, to tell herself now that she shall be missed. 

Belle has fought so long, to remind the world she is still human. She has exhausted herself with the effort. Here in the end she has still been left to die forgotten in a windowless larder, surrounded by potatoes and cornmeal and other things that rot in the dark. It is—hard, not to pity herself, to grieve. Oh, to be dragged out into the bright courtyard where Russandol was strung; to be called a woman, and then killed cruelly, killed quickly, in the sunlight, seen and known and _herself_. At the end, at least, herself. 

(Russandol is quiet, when anyone but Gwindor is near. Russandol flinches from people like a man who wants to disappear.)

( _Look at me_ , she had told him, and he—had.)

_Russandol_ , she thinks: _Russandol would choose to die in the dark._

Her throat hurts, as she swallows, and she shifts her feet against the floor, pulling her knees in close. 

She must stop thinking of Russandol. 

*

Some time later, she thirsts. 

Some time after that, the sound of a door opening—but not her door. Shadows mar the shape of the slim daylight fading beneath the doorframe. Boots clump across the boards—two feet, more. She knows the tread of the one by the heavy, deliberate pace of the man. By the coffee-and-tobacco stink of him, as he breathes. 

He bound her hands so tightly, yet he did not gag her. For the first time, she thinks to wonder why. 

“Goodley,” Gothmog grunts, from the other side of the door: “Fetch him.”

*

It is by _his_ tread that she knows him, too. The uneven stagger of his limp sounds heavier than she would have expected, from how she has seen him move lately, but there is a wounded animal wariness about Russandol in how he fights, always, to hide his hurts. She knew he had been hiding how badly his leg is healing; she had not known just how well he hid it, when he knew she was watching. Russandol must have been very proud, before, in his first life; pride cannot survive in this place except as a stubborn, senseless instinct for survival. 

She hears his limping, and hears him stand still. There is silence, a moment, in the sunlit room beyond the door. In the silence, she can hear the pain-staggered panting of his breathing, too—or perhaps she is only imagining that. Have they hurt him? Are they going to hurt him? Why is he here?

Gothmog does not sound angry, when he calls Russandol a dog. 

But then he says _the comb_ , his tone as reasonable and even as if he were about to explain something very simple to a very recalcitrant child, and her taut-quivering heart sinks, because now she knows. 

In the darkness, Belle lifts her bound hands to her mouth, and shuts the only eye she has left. _Not a sound_ , she tells herself, from some disconnected, icy place that understands, at last, what she is here to die for. _Don’t let him hear you. Don’t let him know._

Russandol says nothing, to all of Gothmog’s goading. But then she hears the creak and scrape of a chair pushed back, and that smoke-thick, drawling voice drops low. 

“I caught your bitch,” Gothmog says. “Have her trussed in the stow behind our larder, there. Funny choice, near the larder. She won’t be seeing light nor food, no, not so much as a lick of water.”

_Food. Water. Light._

(She opens her eye again, despite herself, praying Russandol cannot hear her heartbeat as clearly as she can, hammering in her bones. The light is still there, beneath the door. There is a shadow cutting through it that was not there before: Russandol, standing.)

“I have nothing to tell you, sir,” Russandol says hoarsely, but his voice is always hoarse; there is no meaning, there. 

“Then she’ll starve. And that would be a pity, for you to make her starve.”

Russandol is silent. This, then, is why they did not gag her: that her begging might be both Russandol’s torment and her captor’s delight. She is going to die here, whether or not Russandol admits what she has done—what they both have done—but she shall not give them anything they desire of her own free will, not Russandol’s pain or her own. She presses her swollen hands harder against her mouth and breathes through her nose, harshly. _Maybe he is lying,_ she wishes she could put into Russandol’s mind, could whisper into his ear: _Maybe I am not here. The room is quiet; the door is closed. It is a trick, Russandol, say nothing, say nothing—_

“You won’t even give her the honor of a name?” Gothmog asks, jeering. Russandol’s voice, when he answers, sounds like it did in the first days after his beating, when he nearly died. When he was so desperate for neither she nor Gwindor to think him hurt, even as they cleaned the blood from his broken back.

_Foolish man,_ she had thought then, and thinks now, trembling. _Brave, foolish, beautiful, —_

“I do not know who she is,” is what Russandol says, in that brave-dying voice. He _is_ panting a little, now; he does not stand easily, yet, but she has not heard him fall. He is nothing if not stubborn, is Russandol. That had been one of the things to surprise her, in the barracks. Another had been his quick, clever humor. Another had been the frequencies of his apologies, for all the things that were not his fault.

(Another had been the way it had felt to see him sitting up with Gwindor, with his hair washed clean and curling, with his skin and his eyes lit by the late sun as he turned to her coming and ran one slender hand back through his drying tangles—)

_Enough._

_Pride—cannot survive—in this place._

*

In a long silence, she can hear Russandol’s feet shift a little against the floorboards, as he struggles for his balance. Perhaps Gothmog means to keep him standing until he falls. Such petty cruelty is not the overseer’s way, as a rule, but he hates Russandol. She knows that much; it was not until he realized her death would hurt Russandol, that he cared enough to kill _her._

But then Gothmog is talking again, about that ghastly, bladed mask Russandol wore when he first arrived from the mountain ( _I saved you from that_ , Gothmog rumbles, chair creaking again. Belle had almost forgotten it, so much has happened since. She swallows down the illness she feels, realizing Bauglir’s intent had been for Russandol to wear it for _days_ , remembering how he bled from the mouth even after _one_ , how he had been unable to eat, and he might have _starved_ , oh God, starving, she is—hungry, a little already, she is—)

“Do you think it was out of kindness, boy?”

“No, sir.” 

Russandol’s voice is steady again, but he is scared. She knows he is scared. After seeing how he mouthed off to Gwindor, she would have thought there was no power on earth to make that boy call anyone _sir_.

“Shot your mother in the arm,” Gothmog is saying, and Belle jerks, bites her tongue hard. “—and your father in the chest, I did. You were there, wailing, both times.”

Silence, from Russandol. Belle swallows blood, and stares at the shadow in the light, beneath the door. There is more to this hate than even she knew; the mystery that is Russandol is larger than she guessed, and she will not live, it seems, to puzzle it out. 

_You were there, wailing, both times._

Her useless pity is like a stone in her chest.

“Devil take you,” Gothmog is saying, voice rising, stormhead rising, his good humor wearing at last thin. “Was that not enough?”

She cannot guess at Russandol’s face, for it has been so long since she has seen him fully afraid. All this time since he came into her and Gwindor’s keeping she has accidentally come to know him too well to remember that. She has seen his expressions when he is embarrassed, and when he is pensive, and when he is feeling ornery, despite himself. She has seen the reluctant smiles Gwindor has coaxed out, and the way he furrows his brow when he is sleepy and does not wish to sleep. She has even seen what hope looks like on his thin face, when he once lifted his head quickly at her opening of the door, and then ducked his head just as quickly, disappointed and ashamed, when he saw the children were not with her.

Russandol is shy. He is restless. He never seems to know what to do with his hands. Belle has seen how he flexes his fingers nervously, how he picks at his nails, when he is trying to be calm. 

Maybe that is what he is doing now, in the silence, before he whispers, in a voice that has all of him cut out of it, a voice she has not heard before:

“I am Bauglir’s. I must—serve Bauglir.”

“And the poor lady set her cap at you despite that,” Gothmog sneers, disgust rank in his tone. The sick shame she feels is enough to make her forget her hunger, for a moment. She wants, instinctively, to shrink away from the door. Instead, she does not move, and there is no one in the room with her to see the hot blush rise in her face. She swears she has never tried to—She has never thought—She has seen how Russandol looks at her. He is kind, but still he sees the scars upon her face, before he ever sees _her_. Mairon made certain— _Bauglir_ made certain, of that. 

_I am Bauglir’s._

She is not half in love with Russandol, because any such feeling of affection could only ever humiliate the both of them, or hurt the both of them, and she does not know which would have been worse. 

(She—is not imagining, she _can_ hear the sound of Russandol’s breathing. Too fast. Too loud. He is afraid, and he is alone, and he _must_ know Gothmog is lying to bait him, please don’t let him think—)

_(Oh what matter what he thinks, if I am to die regardless?)_

_(It matters. God help me, it—matters.)_

Silently, in the dark, with no eyes to see her, Belle reaches tentatively out to where Russandol stands, breathing, and rests her hands, lightly as she can, against the shape of his shadow upon the floor.

Gothmog’s voice is sharp in the way a bullet is sharp, when it is fired from a gun.

“Take it off. That contraption round your leg. Take the damn thing off.”

*

Russandol scarcely hesitates. 

*

Belle has seen Russandol fall before in the stableyard, when he is exhausted, or in the fields, when the pain in his leg catches him too unexpectedly. She is no doctor, no matter her efforts, but she has still a suspicion that Russandol’s leg heals more slowly than it ought, even accounting for overuse and poor diet. She mistrusted Bauglir’s work since she first saw the ugly contraption clamped about Russandol’s leg, but Russandol never would allow her to touch it, or look at it too closely. It was despite his efforts that she saw enough—and heard Gwindor complain, enough—to know it is not a thing designed for healing, nor for Russandol to have the power to remove by himself, for relief or any other reason. 

She knows Gothmog must know this, too. 

So: Russandol struggles to obey, and Russandol falls. The crack of brute metal is harsh against the cold floorboards, and Belle feels the impact resonate, as though they fall together. Russandol does not quite cry, but the metal rattles against the floor, and the sound of his breathing is all—wrong. Belle has seen how his rib cage is not fitted together quite right, in tending to his wounds, and has seen how his breathing catches in it, sometimes. This is that, and worse. Gothmog says nothing, not even to mock; must be watching, with the same dispassionate look he had when he watched her hands bleed.

Russandol’s hands are clever, his fingers quick; craftsman’s hands, or so she has thought before. Gwindor says Bauglir has him working on crafting something in the smithy, and that is how he is buying their time—guns, Gwindor told her doubtfully, but somehow more than guns. She has not asked, and knows no more than that. But in her own time she has watched him skillfully work out the tangles in Sticks’ hair with his fingers on some visits, and once he braided it almost tidily, his hands trembling only a little as he wove the plait together.

(She should have noticed he did not use the comb she gave him.)

*

When Russandol’s gasping begins to edge into sobs, Gothmog finally stirs.

“Enough,” he rumbles. He sounds bored, as though to watch a man suffer without result is a waste of his time. “Go and fetch Goodley.”

The metal—drags across the boards, grinding and catching on the uneven joins between. Russandol does not walk, does not stand. Russandol sobs, and his hands fumble upon the floor. 

His voice breaks a little, when he calls. When he falls again, to the sound of a blow, he does cry out, as a creature wild and wounded would cry. There is a tussle, and movement spasm-sharp against the floor, and the sound of sawing, of splitting leather, of thin metal prised apart til it snaps. 

“I can’t get it off him without breaking it, sir, it’s fixed too tight—“

“He won’t be needing it again. Careful with the knife, though, man, have a care! We mustn’t harm Bauglir’s favorite, must we—eh, _Russandol?_ Ain’t that right, Bauglir’s boy?”

*

_(Do not pity me, Russandol says, with the white look in his eyes, with the blood between his teeth, with the bruises he left on Gwindor’s hands after he did not cry out. With the mask at his mouth and the whip at his back. For God’s sake, don’t—pity—me—)_

*

“There you are, sir,” Goodley says, a little out of breath. “Fucking useless.”

Someone is gulping for breath. Someone is shaking, upon the floor.

“You listening, boy?” Gothmog says. “You understand me?” 

Someone pushes themselves to their feet, and walks to the door. An easy, even tread, and a shadow passing through the light. Someone steps out into the sunlight and clean air, carrying the broken splint with them to be burned. 

Someone sets trembling hands against the floor, and tries to breathe.

“I’ll not punish you today.” Gothmog is not laughing. He is not the sort to find humor, in pain; only pleasure. His hand drops against the tabletop with a thud.

“On you go,” he says, and someone—no sound of metal splint now, no sound except ungainly, ugly struggling across the floor—crawls, and drags, and claws their way out of the guardhouse. 

Another shadow, passing and then gone.

The room left behind is very still.

*

After a time, a chair screeches, pushed back. Boots clump against the boards. There is a clatter and creak of gunbelt and buckle, and the crack of broad-hulking shoulders rolled back. Gothmog spits, and step slow and heavy towards the locked door. He taps the toe of his boot ruminatively against the foot of the door, pushing until the wood creaks. His breathing is unhurried.

“You should’ve seen that,” He says gravel-low, suddenly thumping his boot against the door so it jerks in its frame. “Eh, half-face? He was a right sight, I promise you, even for naught but one eye. A shame, what you’re missing.”

He pauses as though waiting for a reply, and then clicks his tongue, steps back. The floor groans as he strolls away, out of the guardhouse, the door drawing shut behind him and cutting off any light at all. 

In the dark, Belle draws herself slowly up, shaking, and shoves clumsily at the tear track running wet down her face. It is some time, before she can stop her crying. Her head aches.

There are marks from her teeth in the back of her hand, where she stifled the sound of her weeping.

She wishes she were dead already.

*

_“He got his hands on a comb somewhere,” Gwindor explains quickly, and he would sound angry if you didn’t know to look him in the eyes. Belle meets his gaze unflinching._

_“Turned it into a knife. When Lem came for him, he fought him off, somehow; that’s the mark on Lem’s face, you’ll have seen it. But Lem broke his leg, damn him, he broke his leg proper this time—“_

_Gwindor’s voice breaks in turn, and he scrubs the back of one hand roughly over his trembling mouth._

_“He can’t walk, Belle. He can’t_ fucking _walk. How are we going to run, if he can’t walk?”_

_She wants to see Russandol herself. By the new marks across her palms she knows it is unsafe, and therefore knows she won’t seek him out, but she cannot help the wanting._

_She folds her arms, and the wanting inside them, and pulls them tight against her ribs._

_“Russandol’s clever,” she reassures Gwindor, with a smile she knows is hideous comfort. “We will find a way.”_

_(The next time she sees Russandol, in the sawdust-soft stables, his leg is the wrong shape.)_

_(The next time she sees Lem, and the angry scabbing on his face, she is glad she gave Russandol the comb.)_

*

Nights are horribly cold. Belle sleeps fitfully, shivering and cramping. Firelight flickers beneath the door, sometimes, when she opens her eye; sometimes it doesn’t. She sleeps during the day, also, and just as poorly. The weaker she gets, the more vivid her dreams. She sees Gwindor in some, or Sticks, or Mairon. Once, she dreams of her father, and wakes to whimper weakly into her useless hands, because she had not realized she had come so close to forgetting the details of his face. 

It is difficult to track the passing time, in her prison. She cannot tell how long she sleeps, except by judging the intensifying hunger that gnaws at her insides, or the thirst that sharpens and sharpens in her throat. It is difficult to think through the pain in her head. Sometimes the light is beneath the door; sometimes there are voices; sometimes it is dark. There is no pattern, and thus no meaning.

No one speaks to her again, until Gothmog, one evening at dinner—judging by the smell of the food, and the color of the light beneath the door—addresses her as casually as though she sat at table opposite him.

“He left,” Gothmog observes, still chewing. “Held his tongue, and went back to the forge. By the time he returns, you’ll be dead. I’m the only one as can save you, now.”

The light beneath the door is red. Firelight.

“What’s he planning?” Her thoughts are slow as treacle, pushing through the pain and dizziness. “We both know he’s clever. He must have some plan working. If you tell me his game, I’ll let you live.”

Belle lies with one side of her face pressed to the floor. Her hunger is so great it has swallowed her; she can no longer understand its pangs, and the rich meat and gravy smell of Gothmog’s dinner makes her feel ill. The sound of liquid poured into a cup is still a torment, but so are many things. She gnaws idly at her peeling lips, her throat so dry it sticks to itself.

She does not make the effort of a reply. Let him think her dead already.

_(Do not pity me, she tells Russandol in some dreams. If he had only known her when she had two eyes, if she had only known him when he was still as proud as she was, in her father’s house by the sea—)_

Gothmog snorts, and tosses his cutlery down with a clatter upon his plate. When he retires to sleep, he leaves the fire burning in the grate.

Red light, twisting across the floor.

When pale light comes again, she knows through rising delirium that it is a morning, but she does not know which.

*

_Do not pity me, for God’s sake, do not._

_Your eyes are like the mercury that sees the storms, she tells Russandol when she sees him in her madness. Your hands could, I think, chart maps as well as mine could, if I had the chance to teach you. Is that what you did, in your life before? Was your life before Bauglir like mine? Did you love the world once, too?_

_No, please—don’t go._

_I won’t ask you anything, only don’t go._

*

Red light.

Red.

_Russandol?_

She is— _gone_ —

*

When next she knows anything, she knows she is dead, until she sees Gwindor’s face.

*

_I’m going to fetch him._ (Who?) _I’ll be back before you know it._

There was love in his voice. _Whose voice?_

_Love._

*

When next she knows anything, the room is gone. The room is gone, and the compound is gone, and she could almost believe death is that simple, except her hands hurt terribly and she is still brutally cold. There is a blanket of some sort laid over her, and she lies on a kind of litter on dry, stony ground. She does not mean to make a sound, but still she must, for suddenly Maria is bending over her, eyes wide.

“Oh! You are awake, you are—Sir! Sir, she has opened her eyes!”

There is a flurry of movement, too much for her eye to track—eye, not eyes, of course, not eyes—so she shuts the lid again, grimacing. When she reopens it there is a man stooped over her whom she does not recognize, and she jolts until she realizes he has laid two fingers against her wrist, and is counting against a pocketwatch. A doctor. 

“Well done,” he says warmly, glancing up at her when she stirs. “Do not try to move, yet. I shall help you.”

His accent is vaguely familiar. It is not at all like Gothmog’s.

(It is like Bauglir’s.)

His hand beneath her head lifts her with practiced steadiness, until she is half-reclining against his arm, too weak to shy away. Maria hovers behind him, looking worried. 

There is worry also in this doctor’s young face, but it is hidden better. Something about the hiding reminds her of someone else, and she catches a sob in her chest, looking up at him. 

“Take some water, if you can,” the doctor urges her, the gentleness in his voice belying the fatigue in his eyes, and the gunpowder black on his face and fingers. There is smoke in the sky behind him, and he is to her unsteady vision for a moment all a part of it: clear blue, smoke-dark, ash-grey. 

She does take some water, from the cracked leather flask he holds to her lips. He helps lift her head as she drinks, but allows her only a moment before he pulls the flask back, shaking his head. 

“Not too much too quickly, Belle—“

He must see the look she gives him, because he smiles a quick smile, smudged a little by the smoke still in the air. 

“Ah, your friend Gwindor told me your name. He asked that I look after you until he returns. You have been through a terrible ordeal, Belle, but you are going to survive. You’re free now.”

“I—“

She does not know what to say, to that. Her whole chest seizes as though she would weep, but no tears will come. Instead, she just trembles, and heaves, and lifts her hand to rub at her eye. She has not seen her hands, in days of darkness; they are thinner than she remembers, more bone than flesh. The welts have scarcely begun to heal, and the rope rings are raw and stinging. 

She is out. They got her _out_. She is out, out in the free world again beyond all hope, and she is going to live, she is going to live among _people_ again while still looking like _this_ , one-eyed and hideous and—

“Estrela,” she whispers. The man at her side—boy, rather, for she can see now he is certainly younger than she is, despite the solemnity of his manner—pauses in stowing the flask away. 

“I beg your pardon?”

“Not Belle,” she says, a little more clearly. “Estrela. Please”

“Very good,” he says kindly, without any confusion. “And I am Fingon, Estrela; try to rest, and not excite yourself overmuch, despite the circumstances. If you need me, do you see that fellow there?”—this, as he points towards another black-browed boy, this one looking very like him except for his squarer jaw and whiskers. “—That is my brother Turgon. He will fetch me, if you ask him. If I cannot come, I shall send someone to tend to you, in my stead. Now please sleep; I will bring you more water, and some food, God willing, within the hour.”

Fingon’s hair is unusually long, considerably longer than her own, and woven through with yellow thread. It falls forward, soft and heavy across his shoulders, as he pushes himself to his feet.

Still trying to gather her wits, Estrela clutches at the heel of his boot as a child would. She is embarrassed, when he turns patiently around, but still—she must know, now that she is remembering.

“I am sorry. Where is Gwindor now?” 

“He has gone to meet with your friend Russandol,” Fingon answers. “They shall be here soon.”

*

She does not mean to sleep, but she wakes up to Maria plying her with more water and the promised gruel. They are in a rough semblance of a camp; there is canvas stretched over her, which is not as bad as a roof, but not as lovely as the sky, either. She does not feel hungry until she tastes the food, and then her stomach roars alive with a ferocity that would have her vomiting sick if Fingon had not been careful to ration the portion according to her strength. Disconsolate, she curls around the pain in her stomach and waits out her body’s slow waking to living again.

“He is a doctor,” Maria tells her, trying to distract her until her next meal is allowed. Estrela sips water, holding the flask herself this time, and tries to imagine it is food. “A real doctor, from New York. His father is a right gentleman; I met him this morning. There are ever so many of them, Belle--Eastern folk, and Indians, and even some women, with guns of their own. We are a right little army, now.”

“Why are they helping us?”

“Seems that they have a quarrel with Bauglir, too. Lucky for us.”

*

_Lucky._ Estrela turns the word over and over in her mouth, after Maria leaves the tent in search of a second blanket to stop her shivering. She is curled on her side, staring at her hands where they are nestled gingerly on the pallet near her face. She cannot move them very well, yet; perhaps young doctor Fingon shall be able to tell her, when he returns, if there is any permanent damage done. 

_Lucky._

Maria said Russandol was there at the compound, for a little time. _Yes; he knows you are alive,_ Maria told her, scraping the last dregs of gruel from the little clay cup. _He saw you, before he left. Looked for you, rather. You could see it in his face, how glad he was to see you._

Estrela does not remember anything about that.

She lies awake in a strange place, waiting for the return of everyone she loves.

*

_In her dreams Russandol always knows her name._


End file.
